Watch the Oh Albert concert film: www.beta.ohalbert.net

Out July 16th, Oh Albert by Elia Rediger, an award-winning artist, singer, and composer. Created to accompany an hour-long concert film by Gregor Brändli, Oh Albert is a musical tribute to Albert Hofmann, the Swiss pharmaceutical researcher who, in 1943, accidentally discovered the hallucinogenic qualities of LSD in Rediger’s hometown of Basel, Switzerland. Orchestrated by William Brittelle, performed by the Basel Sinfonietta (under the direction of Etienne Abelin), and recorded in an old Basel army barracks, the live album is an homage to LSD—the drug that revolutionized brain science, psychology, popular culture, and helped conceive Oh Albert.

“Religion has been called an opiate for the people, a promise of salvation, and then came LSD,” says Rediger. “But it has now been replaced by our new escapist socio-cyber world. Oh Albert is a cinematic experimental concert film, a manic trip through time packed as a 60-minute piece of art—13 songs, a singer, and an orchestra.”

Freedom

On Oh Albert, Rediger sings, plays guitar, and performs nearly every acting role, though the oratorio is far from an individual effort. Donning bob wigs with bangs (and clearly having one hell of a time), the Basel Sinfonietta, under the baton of Etienne Abelin, marries orchestral sounds with nebulous tones and strange synthesizers. “When listening alongside the visuals,” says Rediger, “the whole thing becomes part classical concert, part pop performance.”

Like LSD, a hallucinogenic that offers an alternative to the monotony of workaday life, Rediger’s oratorio follows suit: rigid, repetitive, predictable sections are juxtaposed with abstract, expressive, unpredictable phrases and motifs. Musical influences vanish as quickly as they appear, bearing emotions, here and gone, forgotten as a dream.

“This idea of freedom plays a central role,” says Rediger. “Both Brittelle [who orchestrated the album] and I move very freely in music history. We are quite resistant to being put somewhere. This type of musical freedom is analogous to the effects of LSD, which allows people to think outside established structures.”

Hofmann, the father of LSD, preferred listening to Mozart's flute concertos on his trips. By employing the Basel Sinfonietta, Rediger, a trained classical singer, recognizes Hofmann’s proclivity for classical music—though the oratorio is far from a classical piece. Brändli, the filmmaker, pays homage to Stop Making Sense, Talking Heads’s 1984 concert film, and Rediger and Brittelle channel various musical influences: Frank Zappa, Scott Walker, The Ronettes, Simon & Garfunkel, Sonny & Cher, Sweet, Bay City Rollers, Lou Reed, Sly & The Family Stone, The Emotions, The Jackson 5, and of course, The Grateful Dead.

“The LSD story takes place in Switzerland, where the drug was created, and the U.S., where it caused hysteria and was subsequently outlawed,” says Rediger. “I’m a Swiss artist releasing an LSD oratorio on New Amsterdam, a free-thinking American label that defies genre. That isn’t lost on me.”

An Oratorio in Three Acts

Oh Albert is loosely divided into three acts. Act I—“1966”—follows the discovery of LSD, its mass consumption, the hysteria of the 1960s, and finally, its 1966 prohibition in the United States. “Without the U.S., LSD would have never been prohibited, it would have never been relegated to the underground,” says Rediger. “Today, we are still selling the promises of the 1960s—peace, love, freedom—but at what price?”

Act II—“Dark Age”—which spans some fifty years, chronicles LSD’s criminalization as it is overtaken by U.S. military and intelligence services.

Throughout the oratorio, LSD is personified as Alice, and by Act III—“2020”—Alice finds herself in our digital, virtual world. “Our societal yearnings, our societal ills, seem to be the same as they were in 1966,” says Rediger, “but today, people don’t seem to fight for the same ideals with the same conviction. LSD, it seems, has found its digital counterpart in our virtual world.”

Personified in Oh Albert as the Digital Identity, a sort of LSD doppelganger, this digital counterpart promises its own expansion of consciousness—reaching for, but never quite grasping, an unlimited sphere. But while Rediger is critical of the Digital Identity—the digital world’s empty promise of freedom—he and Brittelle composed Oh Albert over the internet, transforming their composition into 1s and 0s, sending files back and forth across the sea.

“There is an irony and hypocrisy in employing computers to write an oratorio that is critical of our digital world,” says Rediger. “We composed a piece about spiritual freedom over the internet.”

LSD Reassessed

Today, LSD is being reassessed. In the United States, Johns Hopkins University—the nation’s oldest research university—recently launched the Center for Psychedelic and Consciousness Research, the first of its kind in the country. Scientists across the globe are reevaluating the use of psychedelics in treating depression, drug addiction, post-traumatic stress disorder, among other afflictions.

Hofmann, the father of LSD, died at age 102 in his native Switzerland. Though he lived until 2008, Hofmann never witnessed the legal return of his hallucinogenic drug. On Oh Albert, an LSD oratorio, Elia Rediger seeks to channel the freedom Hofmann first felt as he rode his bicycle, fully suited, through the ancient streets of Basel in 1943 on the world’s first LSD trip.

Rediger took acid to create Oh Albert, an LSD oratorio—an effort to channel the freedom Hofmann first felt as he rode his bicycle, fully suited, through the ancient streets of Basel in 1943 on the world’s first LSD trip.

“Kaleidoscopic, fantastic images surged in on me,” recalled Albert Hofmann, “alternating, variegated, opening and then closing themselves in circles and spirals, exploding in coloured fountains, rearranging and hybridizing themselves in constant flux. Every acoustic perception … became transformed into optical perceptions. Every sound generated a vividly changing image.”